Adventures with lightweight and minimalist software for Linux

wiki-stream: Less than six degrees of separation

I didn’t intend for there to be two Wikipedia-ish tools on the same day, but one good wiki-related utility deserves another. Or in this case, deserves a gimmick.

Josh Hartigan‘s wiki-stream (executable as wikistream) tells you what you probably already know about Wikipedia: that the longer you spend daydreaming on the site, the more likely you are to find yourself traveling to oddball locations.

You might not think it possible to travel from “Linux” to “physiology” in such a brief adventure, but apparently there are some tangential relationships that will lead you there.

I don’t think Josh would mind if I said out loud that wiki-stream has no real function other than to show the links that link between links, and how they spread out over the web of knowledge. Best I can tell, it takes no flags, doesn’t have much in the way of error trapping, and can blunder into logical circles at times.

But it’s kind of fun to watch.

wiki-stream is in neither Arch nor AUR nor Debian, most likely because it’s only about a month old. You can install it with npm, which might be slightly bewildering since the Arch version placed a symlink to the executable at ~/node_modules/.bin. I’m sure you can correct that if you know much about nodejs.

Now the trick is to somehow jam wiki-stream into wikicurses, and create the ultimate text-based toy for time-wasting. …